Visual social media is an important setting for everyday dietary communication, but the sources and persuasive features of highly visible diet content remain insufficiently documented. This quantitative content analysis examined source identity and six message-level Health Belief Model (HBM) features in an archived corpus of 180 Xiaohongshu notes retrieved with the Chinese term for ‘Fat Loss Meal’ and ranked by likes. Influencers/bloggers accounted for 66.1% of notes, followed by ordinary users (18.9%), experts or health institutions (13.3%), and marketing/other accounts (1.7%). Cues to action were most prevalent (89.4%), followed by barrier-reduction messages (78.2% of 179 valid cases) and perceived benefits (75.0%). Susceptibility appeared in 40.0%, any severity message in 22.8%, and self-efficacy in 5.0%. Cue prevalence differed across the four source groups (two-sided Fisher–Freeman–Halton exact p = .001; Cramér’s V = .319). Influencers/bloggers had the highest descriptive cue prevalence (95.0%), but none of the six exploratory pairwise contrasts remained significant after Holm correction. The results describe a popularity-ranked sample in which creator-led sources and action-enabling messages predominated. They do not establish nutritional accuracy, audience effects, or algorithmic causation.
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